Planar-Pantheon Analysis: Shu-shi Pantheon

I’ll be writing up some sample planes for Planar Trappings, to show how it fits together. (In draft) I’m expanding the list of traits so it includes the core domains (which include alignments and elements, as well as major societal abstractions).

This both expanded the sorts of traits available (which is handy to me) and gave me an immediate source of planar ideas. If the nature of a deity affects the plane the god lives on, and there is high congruency between deific domains and planar traits, it seems evident that the home of a pantheon can be determined at a high level by the domains assigned to the deities of the pantheon.

Subpantheon

Domain

Auspicious

Normal

Uncanny

Air

0

10

0

Animal

0

100

Artifice

Chaos

10000

Charm

Community

1000

0

0

Darkness

Death

Destruction

Earth

00

10

Evil

Fire

Glory

Good

10

00

Healing

10

00

Knowledge

00

10

0

Law

10

00

Liberation

0

100

Luck

10

000

Madness

Magic

Nobility

1000

0

Plant

0

100

Protection

00

1

00

Repose

0

0

100

Rune

0

100

0

Strength

1000

0

Sun

100

00

Travel

0

10

Trickery

00

10

War

Water

00

10

Weather

0000

10

I’ve started an analysis to see how good or bad this idea is. I created a spreadsheet with all the domains listed and marked correspondence between the domains and the pantheon. ‘1’ indicates that a deity exists in the pantheon having the domain as a primary domain, ‘0’ indicates that a deity exists in the pantheon with the domain as a second domain.

Looking at the Shu-shi pantheon (“Chinese halflings”) I see that Air, Community, Knowledge, Protection, and Rune domains are present in all three subpantheons (auspicious deities, normal deities, uncanny deities). No matter where you go in the plane you can expect to see evidence of this.

The Jixiang Shen (auspicious deities) have the following primary domains: Community, Good, Healing, Law, Luck, Nobility. Their region of the plane more strongly exhibits these traits than others: I picture something like a holy city.

The Zhengchang Shen (common deities) have the following primary domains: Air, Animal, Earth, Knowledge, Plant, Protection, Rune, Strength, Sun, Water. If the region of the auspicious deities is a holy city, this is likely to seem like well-settled land, orderly and well-cultivated.

The Bukeishiyi Shen have the following primary domains: Chaos (all the chaos), Liberation, Repose (‘nice death domain’), Travel, Trickery, Weather. These are likely small pockets of specific interests, possibly treated as subplanes, scattered about the plane but likely farther from the holy city.

There also is overlap between them. The following domains are shared between the auspicious and normal deities: Animal, Earth, Good, Healing, Law, Luck, Nobility, Plant, Water. The following domains are shared between the normal and uncanny deities: Strength, Sun, Travel, Trickery, Weather. I think I could use this to pretty reasonably lay out a regional map showing how the various traits could vary by region.